About eight months ago, I was reading Staircase in the Woods by Chuck Wendig and I thought, “Wow, this is a really good story.”
Then, I stopped and wondered why.
As I’ve been coming back to writing, I’ve been dealing with the same kind of imposter syndrome that I’ve always dealt with, that I feel most writers are prone to. This time though, thanks to six years of therapy experience, I decided to confront the problem. So if I don’t feel like a “real” or “good” writer, what am I supposed to do?
So I made a list of what I think are elements of a good story so that I can consciously include them in my stories, either while writing or rewriting them. I’ve already talked about character and setting. Today, I’m going to talk about narration.
-\-
Narration encompasses all non-dialogue aspects of the story. It’s the vehicle of the story and so its importance should go without saying. Because I’m talking about those aspects individually, for today, I’m going to focus on the mechanics of narration.
The first thing I’m going to say about narration flies in the face of the instruction from every writing teacher I’ve ever had: it’s okay to tell some of the story. Writers hold the advice to “show, don’t tell” as sacred. But I think that the variance between passive and active voice can make the story more interesting to read. If too much telling is boring, then too much showing is exhausting. The example I use most frequently when talking about this is making a character the vehicle for describing something. Consider:
Hobbes sat at the desk, looking at its cluttered surface. He glanced up, the clock showing him that it had been barely five minutes since he’d gotten to the office. He dropped his gaze to the computer screen which showed his full email inbox. He knew it was going to be a long day.
The above passage is okay writing. It’s also repetitive and boring, with the character’s micro-actions serving as over-elaborated ways to show what could be more simply told. This is how I might write (or more likely, rewrite) that passage:
Hobbes sat at his desk, looking at its cluttered surface. The clock above him read five minutes after nine. His computer woke up, automatically opening his email full of unread messages. It was going to be a long day.
There are a couple things going on here that I want to examine. The first passage is full of complex sentences, which are good, meaty sentences. But also overblown. In the second passage, I vary between complex and simple sentences to get more rhythm out of the writing and keep it interesting. While the second passage still uses active verbs in the first three sentences, the shift to passive voice for the last sentence gets the reader’s attention.
That leads me authorial voice.
Is the writer telling us a story, or are we watching the characters act out the story on the page? Are we in first person or third person? If we’re in third person, is it limited, or is there an authorial voice commenting on the story as its being told? The best example phrase for this is “little did (s)he know…”
Both my italicized passages above are written in third person limited, ie we’re with one character and we don’t know anything that he doesn’t know. I can shift this away from limited perspective by cutting to another character in another room, giving the reader information about the story that Hobbes doesn’t know, eg someone plotting to kill him. Or, an even wider view of the story can be achieved through third person omniscient, eg adding the line, “He didn’t know how long a day it would end up being.”
From authorial voice, we get to tone. I’ve read a couple books by Rachel Harrison now, and what I like best about her stories is the consistency of tone as dictated by her main character. She tells her stories from first person perspective, which doesn’t usually work for me for novels. But, for example, Rory, her MC from Such Sharp Teeth has such a sarcastic sense of humor that I found the narration engaging rather than tedious.
The tone of my short passage about Hobbes is pretty straight-forward and non-invasive. That’s usually the style I write in. But I thought my story, “Running with Zombies,” had a great tongue in cheek humor to it, dictated by its bizarre premise of someone running going out for a run during the zombie apocalypse.
Ultimately, it’s not just about the story you tell, but how you choose to tell it.
